A number of applications, such as biomedical and thermal printing applications, require high power laser sources (&gt;1 Watt) in the near infrared region, as well as practical, flexible beam delivery systems. The maximum lasing power which can be extracted from a fibre laser source depends ultimately on the amount of pump radiation which can be coupled into the fibre laser cavity. The large emitting area and extreme aspect ratios (100 .mu.m.times.1 .mu.m) of high power stripe diodes available as pump sources typically result in unacceptably low coupling efficiencies of 10% into single mode fibre.
Double-clad optical fibres, consisting of a single mode core, an inner multimode cladding and a further cladding, offer improved coupling efficiency as the dimension of the inner cladding can be chosen to optimize coupling from the intended pump source. Up to 90% coupling efficiency has been achieved with double-clad fibres. In a typical double-clad fibre, a lasant-doped single mode core, having index of refraction n.sub.1, is surrounded by a large inner multimode cladding with index of refraction n.sub.2 &lt;n.sub.1. This inner multimode cladding is then surrounded by a further layer, with index of refraction n.sub.3 &lt;n.sub.2, which confines radiation in the inner cladding and prevents scattering losses due to accumulation of dirt and humidity on the guiding interface. The pump radiation is transferred from the modes in the inner cladding to the absorptive, single mode core as they propagate along the length of the fibre. In this way several watts of pump power can eventually be completely absorbed by the lasant-doped single mode core and thus single mode lasing at much higher powers can be achieved using double-clad fibres. The double-clad fibre geometry essentially acts as a brightness converter on the order of the area ratio of the inner cladding to the core, which may be typically 400:1.
The overall lasing efficiency of fibre lasers made using double-clad fibre is not as high, however, as in conventional single-clad devices. The absorption of the pump light guided in the cladding is, in a first approximation, governed by Beer's law wherein the absorption coefficient of the doped core is reduced by the cladding/core area ratio. Experimental results have shown that the effective absorption coefficient of concentric circular double-clad fibre is only 5% of that predicted from the geometric area ratio of Beer's law. The reason for this is thought to be as follows. The strength of the absorption of a given mode depends on the field distribution of the mode at the position of the absorptive core. The higher the order of modes, the lower the field distribution at the centre of the inner cladding. For a double-clad fibre optimsed for pumping by a broad stripe diode laser (typically 100 .mu.m wide), the number of modes in the inner cladding is on the order of 10.sup.5, and only a small fraction of the field is propagating in the centre of the inner cladding and can thus be absorbed by the doped core. The radiation transfer from the multimode cladding to the single mode core is reduced by the number of modes propagating in the cladding which do not exhibit a local maxima at the location of the core. Typically, the cladding/core area ratio can be up to 400:1 and in this instance only 3% of the modes are absorbed by the single mode core (Bedo et al. in Optics Communications, 1993, pages 331-335).
It has also been shown by Bedo et al. that the absorption coefficient of double-clad fibre is non-linear with fibre length and may be up to three times larger for short lengths versus long lengths of fibre. This can be understood if one considers the modes propagating in the cladding as two ensembles, those that are absorbed by the core and those that are not, which are inter-related by a mixing parameter. The effective absorption coefficient for the double-clad fibre is then a function of the absorption coefficient, the mixing or power coupling coefficient, and the fraction of the ensemble of non-absorbing modes to the total power in the fibre. The small fraction of modes in the multimode cladding which initially do have local maxima at the position of the core are quickly depleted in a short distance by the highly absorptive core. This has the effect of increasing the relative fraction of non-absorbing modes, and thus reduces the effective absorption coefficient in the remaining length of fibre. The effective absorption of the double-clad fibre, after a characteristic length, is in fact lower than that predicted by considering only the geometric ratio of the areas of the core and cladding regions.
It has been recognized that the introduction of perturbations in the multimode cladding modes induces mode mixing and increases the radiation transfer from the inner cladding to the core. The conventional approach to achieving this effect has been to induce bends in the fibre. However, it is often the case that as many modes as are subsequently coupled into the ensemble of absorbed modes are also coupled into non-guided modes in the cladding and so are lost. The net effect is an only marginal increase in device performance. It has also been suggested to design a fibre with a constant offset of the single mode core from the geometric centre of the multimode cladding. This approach has had some success, however, it is still much less efficient than the 100% transfer efficiency inherent in traditional single-clad single mode fibre lasers in which the pump radiation and lasing mode are both guided in the same waveguide structure.
There remains a need to improve the overall efficiency of devices incorporating double-clad fibre geometries such as fibre lasers and amplifiers. It is therefore an objective of the invention to provide a structure for a double-clad optical fibre wherein there is improved coupling of the modes in the cladding to the core and thereby improve the performance of such devices.